Recently, I had the opportunity to interview William E. Perry, author of the book “iTeam: Putting the "I" Back into Team”. In the interview, William stressed how important it is to get people with the right skills into your team.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have more insight into the quality of a product, while it is developed, instead of afterwards? If you could measure the quality of your product, and take action when there is a risk that the quality would become lower than required by your customer?
Teams are more and more becoming the core of organizations. Whether project teams, agile teams or any other form of collaboration that is chosen in a company, the setting in which people collaborate is often teamwise. But establishing teams, and keeping them stable isn’t always that easy.
The old adagium “knowledge is power” has been replaced by a 2.0 version: “sharing knowledge is power”. I’m sharing my presentations, papers and all other things that I have published over the years with you, in my list of publications.
Communication is an important factor in improvement programs. Communication using visual management pictures the goals and approach. It motivates people to commit to change, by showing expected benefits and early results. But wrong or too much communication can also frustrate people, getting them to resist changing.
Software reviews and inspections significantly improve the quality of products, and provide major savings in cost and time. Sound logical, but where is the data to prove it? I’ve made an overview of data that has been published on the business benefits of reviews.
The quality of software is often still insufficient. Pair programming is a proven technique that prevents defects from entering the code.
R&D Organizations are more and more relying on measurements, but many struggle to implement them. There are the usual technical problems associated with collecting and storing data, and creating usable reports. However, the biggest challenges are often related to using the data to actually make decisions and steer the activities of the organization.
I have described a process and a checklist to help organizations that want to start with it, and I´m providing a report with an example in a handy booklet on RCA: Tools for Root Cause Analysis.
Earlier I described how you improve the performance of IT organizations in an agile way. The Agile Journal published a compact version of agile process improvement.
Some companies say that “people are our most important resource”. I’d rather use the term “professionals”, since they are trained, have build up experience and are continuously developing themselves to deliver value for your customers. Question is: Are they empowered to do this in a efficient and effective way? The People-CMM can be used to develop a powerful professional workforce, supporting self-organizing agile teams.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has been used for many years to determine a fault’s first or “root” causes in order to identify process improvement opportunities. The CMMI V1.3 has increased the possible deployment of RCA.